Nick Hopkins
A youthful Nick H at my parents’ house where I am rebuilding a BSA Beagle engine. I owned 3 or 4 of these unsuccessful lightweights and my father had one too, it is probably his engine that is on the bench. If you were aware of their problems (members of the BSA Service Dept. certainly were!) and knew how to fix them they were actually quite a pleasant little bike. I commuted to work on one for quite a while.
The official BSA Factory Ariel 3 display team at the Lord Mayor’s Parade in Birmingham in 1970. A very well-behaved performance in contrast to what was going on further back where Arthur Browning was pulling wheelies on a works Victor GP motocrosser!
Nick tells us "Soon after I joined the Service Dept. Bob Currie wanted a rider to model the new D10 Sports Bantam for the forthcoming “1967 BSA & Triumph Ranges” feature in the “Motor Cycle” magazine (3rd. November 1966 issue). I drew the short straw and the photo shows me circulating a roundabout on Golden Hillock Road on a wet day in October 1966 while BC took pictures. A different photo from the same session appeared in the magazine."
My delightful pillion passenger is Claire Ross (BSA-Regal Group Secretary) and I’m the happy fellow next to her. The bike is one of the very first Commandos which BSA-Regal had bought from the estate of Tony Denniss, one of the original Commando design team and late Club member. As a reward for bringing the Commando to production Tony (along with some others of the team) was invited by Norton-Villiers company Chairman Dennis Poore to select his personal machine from the production line.
Eventually the bike fell in to disuse but it was subsequently completely rebuilt by John McLaren and Reg Paynter (formerly of the John Player Norton race team) in their workshop in Andover. Tony kept a detailed record of everything that was done to it while it was still in use and this document along with the machine itself now belongs to Andover Norton International Ltd.